In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with Europe’s ongoing experiment in massive, indiscriminate immigration – in which crime news is airbrushed of details one mustn’t register, and ludicrous progressive women perform please-don’t-rape-me dances. And in which those on whom this experiment is being conducted, the indigenous population, are expected not to notice any unhappy transformation of their neighbourhoods. Say, by the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes.

We also pondered the reinvention of maths teaching by progressive educators in order to flatter the selfish and disruptive. A reinvention deemed necessary because “mathematics curricula are saturated in whiteness,” which causes “intellectual trauma” to students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and who repeatedly undermine the efforts of others. The exact meaning of the term “whiteness,” deployed many times, remained unclear, beyond a claim that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”

And we visited an immensely progressive Austrian kindergarten, where staff saw fit to expose four-year-old children to “sexual education” without parents’ knowledge or consent, using images of naked men pretending to be women. Other visual aids included jolly scenes of obese adult men showering with children. Parents who dared to question the suitability of the staff’s enthusiasms found their children promptly expelled and blacklisted from 93 kindergartens throughout Vienna, on grounds of being insufficiently tolerant and inclusive.

Academic matters weighed upon our minds in February, with news of the new position, at King’s College London, of Yasmin Benoit, a “model and award-winning asexual activist,” whose asexual credentials include pointedly and repeatedly drawing attention to her cleavage. Ms Benoit’s insights, aired via Instagram, included the now mandatory claims of racial victimhood, and the revelation that SpongeBob Squarepants is also asexual. We were intrigued to hear that Ms Benoit would be revealing her first academic paper within three weeks of her appointment. Doubtless a sign of the scholarly rigour in play.

We also learned that Shakespeare’s The Tempest includes scenes of bad weather and must therefore be accompanied by pre-emptive trigger warnings, lest drama students at the University of the West of England be rendered tearful and distraught. Among the 200 similar cautions issued by the university were warnings of references to blood in Macbeth. Not to be outdone, the Chichester Festival Theatre felt it necessary to warn patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most widely seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.

Oh, and we dutifully noted the latest frontier of human suffering – namely, the phenomenon of hair dysphoria. In which, deep psychological distress can be caused both by length and lack of length simultaneously. Such is our age of competitive complications.

The wellbeing of burglars was a topic in March, following efforts by California’s progressive lawmakers to outlaw the defence of one’s home and loved ones against sociopathic intruders with long criminal histories. Said lawmakers were distressed by the thought of the law-abiding regarding the violation of their homes as in any way provocative or a basis for self-defence. Homeowners, we were told, should instead “retreat,” thereby reducing the risk of “force likely to cause death or great bodily injury” to the burglars, whose wellbeing is apparently a matter of great importance, if only to progressive lawmakers. Advocates of the policy claimed that meekly surrendering one’s possessions to criminals, thereby emboldening them, “promotes racial justice.”

We then catalogued some memorable examples of the latest status-seeking fad – namely, vandalising the Teslas of random motorists. We considered the conceit that picking at one’s own arse in a public car park and wiping the excavated material onto some random person’s car constitutes a moral triumph, the sign of a good person, and the decision to do this to a make of car equipped with eight external cameras. An activity that suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.

The month also brought us transgender-sex-offender-urine-hurling news, in which a cross-dressing gentleman in Germany – known, by himself, as “Sophie Koko” and resplendent in a polka-dot ensemble – proved difficult to apprehend. Possibly due to the public being told by both the police and media that the man lifting his frock and flashing his genitals, and threatening to murder women, and spraying children with his own piss, and for whom they should be alert, was somehow a woman.

And we encountered the traumatising outrage of not having one’s feet affirmed as “non-binary.”

The studious observance of fabulist pronouns came to our attention in April, when sexual predation met the world of Scooby Doo. And when Mr Alec Ray Craig, aged 27, found himself in the care of the Albany Police Department, following his activities at South Albany High School, where the bestubbled Mr Craig tried to pass himself off as a fifteen-year-old girl. Mr Craig was indulged by the court with two years’ probation and ordered to stay at least 500 feet away from schools. Local parents were invited to rely on the promise of a 27-year-old man with a history of violating similar conditions, and who is convinced that he’ll be perceived as an adolescent girl.

Via the pages of Psychology Today, we noted the evaporating standards of “affirmative psychotherapy.” Specifically, the loudly announced imperative to “validate without hesitation,” in which a willingness to pretend the untrue – that a man is a woman, say – and to then applaud oneself as righteous and heroic – is the highest possible goal of a mental health professional. In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy.

And academia’s hothouse of pretentious agonising once again steered us to the topic of middle-school mathematics. Writing in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, curriculum writer and “social justice” activist Michael Lolkus claimed that the rules of multiplication, percentages and other simple mathematical operations are being befouled by “whiteness,” albeit in ways left entirely mysterious. Mr Lolkus lamented his “positionality” as a “knower of… mathematical concepts,” and therefore an oppressor, before suggesting that underperforming minority pupils – the party least familiar with the subject matter – should be put in charge of structuring lessons and the broader curriculum. A sure-fire recipe for success.

May prompted us to consider the merits of living next door to antisocial morons, “problem families,” as recommended by two Guardian contributors. That’s recommended for others, obviously, not the columnists themselves. Dr Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer, wants to ensure that more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.” By which he means people who blast out loud music in the small hours and who, for entertainment, hurl pets from upstairs windows. While Zoe Williams, who lives far removed from any rough council estates, told us that those who’d prefer not to be assailed by thunderous basslines at 4am, or to have their evenings enlivened by terrified animals falling from the sky, are merely being “dehumanising” and needlessly judgemental.

We also marvelled at the Labour government’s efforts to spare burglars the indignity of jail sentences in prisons deemed overcrowded. Along with plans to prematurely release murderers and rapists, up to 1,500 each year. We then mulled the implication that the level of serious criminal behaviour at any given time should somehow conform to the amount of prison space you have at that time. As if the moral gravity of a criminal act, and likelihood of recidivism and danger to the public, should be determined by whether or not you can be bothered to build another dungeon.

And thanks to the scrupulously peer-reviewed Journal of Lesbian Studies, we visited a world of tree-licking, politically radical masturbation, and an erotic activity coyly referred to as “lesbian-dog relationalities.”

In June, we beheld some lively scenes from the zombie apocalypse in downtown Los Angeles, where gangs of masked progressive activists throw themselves at moving cars in an attempt to dominate alarmed and bewildered drivers, before feigning outrage when the inevitable self-inflicted injuries finally occur. These supposedly radical activities, a kind of demented recreation, prompted thoughts on how the activists’ own actions – their gleeful disregard for normal moral boundaries, while finding amusement in repeatedly causing damage and alarm – render their wellbeing of very low importance.

We also witnessed the fractious melding of witchcraft and transgenderism, and the hierarchy of pretending things that aren’t actually true. A world of colliding make-believe, in which Ms Angela Howard, a “second generation witch,” found herself expelled from both the UK Pagan Federation and the British Druid Order, and denied any further training in uncanny powers, following her belief that ladies’ toilets should be occupied by women, not oddly dressed men. The Pagan Federation issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate.” And so, we were lectured on reality by people who think they’re witches.

And we unearthed some improbable agonising from the pages of the Guardian, where topics of torment included the woman-unhinging properties of cupcakes, the oppression of insufficiently gender-balanced barbecues, and an exquisitely delicate woman crushed by spellcheck software.

In July, we revisited our experiment in multiculturalism and indiscriminate immigration, in which uninvited newcomers have to be reminded that torturing animals and loitering by school gates in order to film children are activities not generally approved of by the indigenous. There followed a menu of other cultural subtleties not being grasped by new arrivals – say, queuing, courtesy and not raping schoolchildren – along with efforts by governments to tactfully convey local customs, while suppressing any noticing of what must not be noticed. Apparently, we must explain civilisation to those unfamiliar with the concept, while pretending that no such corrective measures are required or taking place.

Via the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” in tales about white people, and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance.

We also visited Loughborough University, where senior lecturer Dr Ben Roberts has devised, at taxpayer expense, an unorthodox use for yoghurt – namely, smearing it on windows so as to slightly lower indoor temperatures during that rarest and briefest of phenomena, the British heatwave. Dr Roberts assured those intrigued that, as soon as the yoghurt has dried, “the smell disappears.”

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.

We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.

And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”

And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.

The world of art enriched us in March, thanks to the Guardian’s gushing coverage of an exhibition – curated “in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups” – of mass-produced My Little Pony dolls. Faced with piles of items both ubiquitous and banal, visitors to the exhibition were assured that the plastic objects on display, which could be found in any toy shop in any city, are tools of resistance for the marginalised and unseen, and are “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” Yes, a full-on face-blast of culture.

We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”

Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.

We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.

And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

May brought to our attention a cornerstone of many a progressive worldview – specifically, allegations of randomness regarding everyone’s birth. As if you – the person reading this – could somehow have been born to entirely unrelated people, with entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have – and still be the same person. Because, it seems, it was mere “luck and random chance” that your parents’ child was you. Needless to say, the people making these claims were not themselves parents. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some arbitrary or pointless occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events.

Days later, scenes from a bus stop in Ruislip, Greater London, took on symbolic qualities and offered us a snapshot of a culture being downgraded, rapidly and perhaps irretrievably, thanks to its its supposed enrichment by newcomers for whom queueing is a seemingly alien concept. We then explored the gleeful and not infrequent punishment for those careless enough to notice such things.

We also looked on as the Vancouver Police Department, the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation insisted on referring to a deranged man as somehow being a woman, thereby setting fire to whatever credibility they could still be said to have. The man in question, Nathaniel Francis Beekmeyer, had recorded social-media videos in which he describes himself as “super cute” and “a beautiful person,” and hence his enthusiasm for assaulting random women and their four-month-old babies. The passers-by who intervened and overpowered Mr Beekmeyer faced further strange behaviour on seeing news reports in which this shirtless man was referred to by the police and media as a woman. As if their own, first-hand perceptions, from mere inches away, were somehow wildly and implausibly inaccurate.

In June, we encountered the deep, woke wisdom of Hannah McElhinney, who wanted us to know about her “queer temporality,” and the fact that “LGBTQ+ people experience time differently to straight and/or cisgender people.” Which, entirely coincidentally, makes her much more special than you. Paying attention to one’s queerness is, we learned, a favoured activity, along with mentioning at length the crushing burdens of being so complicated and fascinating. As opposed to those ordinary mortals who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.

Another cognitive colossus raised our eyebrows days later, in the form of the World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken. Ms Auken wishes to correct our primitive, territorial lifestyles – say, by making us surrender our cars to random strangers, at seemingly random intervals, and for purposes unknown. Having people you don’t know take away your car would, we were assured, be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.” This vision of an unpropertied tomorrow, in which everything belongs to the state, and nothing belongs to you, prompted many replies, among which, “Anybody ever wash a rented car? No?” And, “Sorry about your wife going into labour, I needed some cigarettes. By the way, you need some new tyres.”

And we beheld the dazzling thoughts of Atlantic columnist Xochitl Gonzalez, a supposedly downtrodden Person Of Pigmentation, whose article was highlighted by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. Ms Gonzalez wanted us to believe that she is oppressed by expectations of reciprocal courtesy and basic consideration. Say, the assumption that you won’t wander into a library, where people are studying for exams, and start blasting out loud music. When not denouncing the “gentrification” of white library patrons, whose appreciation of Brooklyn hip hop combos is insufficiently fulsome, Ms Gonzalez spends her time mentioning how “minority” and “of colour” she is, as if waiting for applause. Or at least deference.

July introduced us to the world of politically radical tableware. By which, I mean unattractive, poorly made objects intended to propagate pretentious racial guilt. Our guide to this phenomenon, Victoria Burgher, a PhD student at the University of Westminster, insisted that creating unattractive plates is “crucial to any antiracist social justice work.” When not making unsightly tat, Ms Burgher spends her time telling the credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.” You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

No less radical was Kate Auletta, the editor-in-chief of Scary Mommy, a publication for ladies of a progressive leaning. Ms Auletta’s contribution to human advancement entails showing her bare arse to her small boys, then applauding herself in print. Having listed her numerous physical imperfections, including a big, sagging bosom and a fat upper pubic area, Ms Auletta went on to detail the ways in which her two small boys are being politically improved by the sight of her incongruous crack and badger. This feat of not wearing knickers.

And we encountered Argentina’s first transgender pilot, a burly chap now named Traniela Campolieto, who bangs on about the super-girly tightness of his uniform while using the cockpit to take endless, pouting selfies. Before becoming a shimmering vision of womanliness, Mr Campolieto was a professional bodybuilder, a proverbial brick shithouse. Which may explain his enthusiasm for bad wigs, the transformative powers of which may have been overestimated. And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are somewhat unreliable, not least regarding himself.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Oh, and we were treated to the creative efforts of artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose juddering and convulsions were artistically enhanced by twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese. When not “investigating bodies of cultural debris” and being showered with atomised dairy products, Mr Romania teaches those less gifted than himself at New York’s Centre for Performance Research and other places of learning.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.

We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.

And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”

In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”

We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.

And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.

March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.

Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.

We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with an oddly specific medical diagnosis courtesy of the Guardian, where Afua Hirsch informed us that boob eczema is caused by “racist microaggressions.” Readers were left to suppose that the condition might only be resolved by lengthy grumbling about “structural racism” and the oppressive nature of “whiteness.” More prosaic solutions – say, a change of detergent, or indeed bra, were not explored. “Whiteness” also bedevilled Ms Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, who was both mystified and aggravated by the existence of non-white Trump supporters, and who identified “multiracial whiteness” as the only conceivable explanation. For Ms Beltrán, non-white voters who prefer to be engaged with as individuals, as opposed to racial mascots, are merely surrendering to “whiteness” and “white supremacy.” And so, Ms Beltrán bemoaned racism and “the debasement of others” while casually erasing agency from anyone brownish who happens to disagree with her.

Meanwhile, academics at the University of York were rendered fretful and distraught by an image on the website of an art history conference – specifically, of the seventeenth-century Buddhist figurine, the three wise monkeys – which, via much focussing of intersectional lenses, was construed by our academics as a caricature of black people, and therefore oppressive. And denunciations of “whiteness” and “white supremacy” also featured in a mandatory course at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. On grounds that, in order to be a dentist, you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance.

In February, we beheld the chutzpah of our new downtrodden elite at the United Nations International School, where the children of diplomats and titans of international banking insisted that even a single mispronunciation of an unobvious name is a form of “racial trauma” inflicted by “the white man’s mouth.” Elsewhere, at the University of Minnesota, we heard one student recount his experience of racial profiling and police brutality – “the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced” – and then, thanks to dashcam video, saw what actually happened.

And in the Los Angeles Times, the scrupulously progressive Virginia Heffernan aired her outrage at neighbours who cleared the snow from her driveway, but failed to vote for Joe Biden – the latter act requiring “absolution,” and thus excusing Ms Heffernan’s supposedly principled ingratitude for the former. You see, resenting neighbours’ acts of kindness, and publicly badmouthing those neighbours, in print, is the progressive way, and a basis for expecting applause.

Oh, and we also learned how to turn toilet paper into drinkable alcohol.